So in the last few years, I’ve seen some thoughts that are springing up on Reddit with respect to economic issues. They generally take two forms:
Capitalism is failing (“late stage capitalism”) , and corporations/CEOs are the root of all evil.
Socialism is the way to go, thrown in with a bunch of labor theory of value ideas. 4
It’s all a bunch of nonsense- when you confront it and either point out that socialism hasn’t actually worked anywhere it’s been tried, or that most corporations are small companies, not huge multinational conglomerates, and that what counts is the quality of the good, not how much labor was put into it, and you get a whole bunch of sputtering anger, without any real comebacks or alternatives.
It strikes me that this had to come from somewhere- it seems too fully formed as an idea to have just sort of cooked up among young people out of nowhere, It also seems to be too coherent of a message for that. And it’s not the usual small number of callow yet radical college students either.
So I’m wondering if it’s Chinese/Russian trolls spreading these ideas. That would explain the coherence, short time frame, and fully-formed-ness of the ideas.
Am I off base, or is there any merit to the thought?
I haven’t found anything on reddit worth reading and completely gave up on it in October. I never joined or created an account. It seems like most posts and related comments are re-posts of whatever gets upvoted or liked, with no real debate or insight, just rehashing the same things over and over. For example r/fluentinfinance went from a small subreddit to a multi-million user subreddit seemingly overnight. Many highly-liked or upvoted posts are years old reposts of some nobody’s twitter comment about student loan forgiveness or what billionaire should be hanged, etc.
I know people here have defended it-- “oh the small subreddits are invaluable…” or whatever, but I haven’t found that to be true either, in my experience. E.g. I have a hobby that is technical in nature and not very popular, and have never found any post to these specific subreddits to be of any unique insight or something I didn’t already know. I have accounts on Groups.IO and a message board specific to the hobby and the conversations/questions are much higher quality.
I do agree with you, not necessarily on the merits or criticisms of socialism, but that reddit seems mostly corrupted with troll/bot posts and whatever gets upvote/likes. I have heard there are “karma farms” in which users post, to be able to use limited subreddits, etc. How that type of activity can be considered useful, I don’t understand. I imagine most big social media sights are “upvote” or “like” driven as well (I do not have any social media accounts other than here, youtube and a couple other message boards).
Modern Russia is a semi-fascist oligarchy, who are more likely to shill somebody like Musk than Communism; some might be Chinese.
That said, a lot of pro-Communism people are also pro-Russian anyway (including demonizing Ukraine and justifying its conquest and genocide). Russia doesn’t need to employ somebody for them to be pro-Russian anyway, and a lot of those people are totally unwilling to acknowledge that Communism is as dead as a doornail in Russia.
In other words I don’t think you are looking at young, radical Communists. You are looking at old radical Communists. Who are getting louder because capitalism is pretty obviously not working like most people want, but are still stuck on an old solution that historically hasn’t worked.